Living Life Bravely

so many sad things happened in these last few days. i just feel so damn sad. so so sad, my heart aches. yesterday, i lost a patient. he came in to our ward with just a broken leg and we’ve managed to fuck him up enough with our wonderful drugs that he started vomiting blood. and the wonderful surgical team who does not want to have the responsibility of his death on their hands, washed their hands off him by asking for supportive management and to optimize him for operation. wtf! how the hell are we supposed to optimize him when he’s bleeding non-stop inside?! only the night before, he was just complaining that he shouldnt have come into the hospital and the next morning, he layed there dead, with blood all over his bed. and there was nothing we could do=’(

i lost another patient today. i admitted him a few days before, because he broke his leg when he fell of his bicycle. nice uncle who didnt want to have an operation, who hoped that his leg would heal with just a cement cast. then in the ward, he wasnt feeling well and did not eat much, but the stupid orthopaedic department medical officers and surgeons who do their daily rounds only look at the orthopaedic problem and do not care about the rest of the patient. so it was left to the interns to treat the patient. and when these ukraine-grads (useless stupid buggers) saw that his blood pressure was low, they started him on drugs instead of hydrating him. to even the untrained eye, he was dry as a raisin. but they didnt think of that, they just thought low blood pressure, start drugs. and he had difficulty breathing but they didnt ask him and he didnt complain about it and didnt notice his tachypnoea until yesterday when his blood pressure dropped even with the dopamine and they called me. when i reached, he was tachypnoeic but stil alert and conscious. and he told me, ‘lucky you’ve come, i dont know what these people are doing’. and because he couldnt make it on his own, i electively intubated and ventilated him. we did a chest x-ray and found he had severe lobar pneumonia. and in the night, he developed acute renal failure and liver failure. and this morning he collapsed and died.

the worst part about these 2 deaths is that it could have been prevented by better prevention, by detecting early, by more responsible management. i played a part in causing the death of both, because if i had been more responsible, i would have double-checked on their management. in both cases, since they were under the care of other medical officers, i assumed those medical officers were doing their job in taking care of them and even though somewhere inside, i knew that they were probably getting substandard care, i still easily pushed them out of my mind because i was busy and lazy and had other things to do.

i feel like shit. i didn’t kill them. but i allowed others to do so because of my own selfishness. i had the knowledge to prevent their death. but i didnt use that knowledge because i washed my hands off them. i knew that the doctors in that ward were useless but i didnt do anything anyway.